Electrolytic vs poly


What’s the opinion on sound difference between say a Mundorf e cap or alcaps VS a lower end poly. E’s are so much cheaper in the mid and higher values compared to poly’s and films. Or is it more a life span issue rather than a sound issue. Talking speaker crossover's here. 
128x128pkvintage

Showing 2 responses by pragmasi

Electrolytic capacitors (regardless of the manufacturer) produce much more distortion than polypropylene, for that reason I never use them to set a time constant (like in a crossover). They are pretty much irreplaceable in power supplies because as you say they are available in much higher values. It is also possible to use them to AC couple the signal, as long as they are grossly overrated they will not affect the signal within the audible frequency range.

There is nothing wrong with using multiple capacitors in parallel (you just add up the values), unfortunately this doesn't apply to the voltage rating so each one of the capacitors needs to be rated in excess (usually double) the maximum output voltage (RMS). The other advantage is that you can measure each capacitor's value individually and come up with a combination that get's close matching for left and right channels. All you need for that is a pretty basic multimeter.

I'd advise taking a look at something like the Wima MKP 4F before shelling out on the boutique types. 
If you have to go with electrolytics then don't forget to order bipolar ones... I'd go with cheap pp over electrolytic every time. It's fine to mix capacitor types and values. Each cap either in parallel or on its own needs to be higher than the highest rms voltage... those speakers are 100W into 6Ω which is around 25Vrms, double it for safety - all caps should be rated 50VAC or higher but they don't need to be the same as one another.
Hope that helps.